MoSt Poetry Book Club

Monday, November 21, 2022     6:30-7:30 p.m.     

Stanislaus County Library Makerspace    1500 I Street, Modesto

 The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón

Join host Gary Thomas for a discussion of The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón, the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.  Limón is also the host of the critically-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown.  Her new book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, is out now from Milkweed Editions.  She is the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States.

5 copies of the book are available (while they last) to check out at the Modesto Library (1500 I Street.).

 An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist, and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. 

 “I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,” writes Limón.  “I am the hurting kind.”  What does it mean to be the hurting kind?  To be sensitive not only to the world’s pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world?  To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they “do not / care to be seen as symbols”?

“Ada Limón’s sixth and latest collection is a testament to the power of sensitivity. As with her previous award-winning books, The Carrying and Bright Dead Things, these poems are acutely aware of the natural world. And Limón has a knack for acknowledging nature’s little mysteries in order to fully capture its history and abundance. For her, evidence of poetry is everywhere. She connects big ideas – fear, isolation, even death – with little details, like field sparrows, a box of matches or “the body moving / freely.” Above all, The Hurting Kind asks for our attention to stay tender.” NPR, Books We Love

“”Poetry readers have come to expect greatness from Limón, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the National Book Award, and that is exactly what the author offers in The Hurting Kind. . . . My most brief statement on the quality of this collection is this: If you have space to teach just one book of poetry, make it The Hurting Kind. . . . What Limón manages with The Hurting Kind is rare; the poems are at once highly specific and yet broadly relatable, both technically masterful and easily comprehensible. In sum, this collection works equally well for both the avid poetry enthusiast and the reluctant reader. If I was going to try and convince someone that poetry is our most important verbal art, I would start with The Hurting Kind. . . . The Hurting Kind is a collection that begs to be shared, and one that will inevitably show signs of wear as readers carry it with them for weeks at a time.”—The Poetry Question